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Zoe Saldana abandons ‘archaic’ sleep training method

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The Avatar beauty and her husband, Italian artist Marco Perego, welcomed Bowie and Cy in November and although the couple is enjoying life as parents, Saldana admits training the boys to sleep through the night is proving a lot harder than initially anticipated. She and Perego have been taking tips from Saldana’s sister, Mariel, who became a mother just months before the actress, and her tried and tested method involved leaving the baby to cry for extended periods of time in a bid to wear the kid out. Mariel and her partner warned Saldana and Perego that hearing their children cry and not tending to them immediately would be hard emotionally, so they suggested having some alcohol handy to help calm the anxious parents’ nerves.

Saldana explains, “It’s overwhelming because there are so many different methods. Just the other day, my sister, who has a nine month old, shared with us the method that she did. She brought the piece of paper and grabbed us both with a bottle of vodka… That’s how her and her husband did it. Because the moment you hear your child cry, it’s like, it rips the guts out of you. And… we have two. It’s crazy.

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“So there’s a bottle of Skinnygirl (vodka brand) and we had the (baby) monitor with the volume all the way high. We have this little note thing, this log (guide) that you have to be logging in (following) all the time. We put them down, say, ‘Mummy and daddy love you’ in Italian and Spanish… and then we walk out and they’re having a meltdown.

“So then you have to time it, then you go in… We go in and I’m like, ‘What do we do?’ No eye contact, just say, ‘Mummy and daddy love you…’ and she (her sister) would come pull us out. So by the third time, it had been 45 minutes already. We were kind of buzzed. It’s heart-wrenching. My husband doesn’t drink and he’s like, ‘Gimme that bottle!'”

The method proved to be too much for Saldana and Perego to handle and they decided to work it out on their own – but only after openly questioning Mariel’s parenting skills while in the heat of the moment.

Saldana continues, “So then we go (into the boys’ bedroom) and we just finally abort. We abort mission. We take our kids. I take one, he takes the other, and we’re both crying. The boys’ bodies are… weeping… and you go, ‘Oh, my God, he’s never going to forgive me for this.’ And then, Marco and I are talking in the room going, ‘It’s not for us. It’s too archaic. There has to be a more gentle method. They did it because they’re insensitive. They don’t care about their children.’ My sister’s outside with the monitor at full volume…! They were just like, ‘We get it.'”